Defining Appropriate Goals For Your Market Research Project

(part of Chapter 1: Know Your Goals)

 

When it comes to defining appropriate project goals, it is best to think in terms of questions or hypotheses. Your golden ticket lies in formulating fewer, “high-level” goals rather than multiple ones in need of conquering.

Too many goals dilute a project and increase the risk of failure. Read on to learn how to formulate your goals.

 

Setting appropriate goals

When we’re thinking about goals for MR projects, it’s often helpful to think in terms of questions or hypotheses. Some examples of goals stated as questions follow:

• How can we improve sales of a product that hasn’t met expectations?
• How can we improve our penetration within a specific customer group?
• Why have we experienced a sharp increase in customer defections?
• Which of three new product concepts should we invest in developing further?
• Which of several new possible geographic territories should we invest in for new distribution?
• What types of marketing messages are likely to resonate with our target customers as we roll out this new product or solution?
• What percentage of our target market knows we exist?
• What percentage of a specific customer group has favorable impressions of our brand? And how can we increase this percentage?

 

These are all examples of pretty specific questions that can serve as excellent goals to define a research project’s scope. While your own questions may be different, use these as a guide for how to ask questions that are precise enough to be meaningful.

In some cases, you might actually already have hypotheses, and that’s also a great way to define a project. Examples of hypotheses that a research project can be designed to test include the following:

• We have a hypothesis that awareness of our product is dramatically higher among 18- to 35-year-olds than among those 36 to 49.
• We have a hypothesis that we can charge a premium for product X if it includes feature Y.
• We have a hypothesis that packaging preferences for our category vary dramatically by world region.
• We have a hypothesis that our new product is likely to cannibalize sales of one of our other products.
• We have a hypothesis that customer buying criteria are shifting such that customers are now primarily buying on price.
• We have a hypothesis that sales of new product A are lackluster because our channel partners are not adequately trained with it.

 

Whether in the form of questions or hypotheses, specifying, agreeing on, and documenting specific goals at project onset is the first step. Whether you have questions or specific hypotheses, once you identify your top two or three priorities, you can proceed to the next steps: choosing the best option for meeting your goals, writing the RFP, and identifying potential agencies.

Wait a minute. “Just two or three?” you ask. Yes. The most successful custom MR projects have one or two high-level goals, three at the most. Of course, under that level, there can be several subgoals.

For example, in a case where the primary goal is to measure brand awareness among a target customer group, appropriate subgoals might be (a) to understand how that varies by region or country, and (b) to test how it compares relative to competitive brands. So, yes, stick to just a few high-level goals—but of course, each may have a set of appropriate subgoals.

 

This is an excerpt from the book, "How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies," which is available on Amazon. Published by Research Rockstar LLC. Copyright © by Kathryn Korostoff. All rights reserved.